3 Below

  “You go — I’ll get the duckling,” Mr. Whitney offered. But he was the slowest of them all, the least qualified to catch a lightning-fast duckling trying to get away with a treat.

  Mr. Pilf, showing surprising mettle, ran back in the direction of the group, yelling for Alfred to get off the roof.

  “You’ll barely make it!” he said, looking up as the shadow of the building was cast over the Whippet Hotel. It was only fifty feet overhead and descending fast.

  But Mr. Pilf could not have been more wrong. Alfred Whitney was a Duck, through and through, and kneeling down he opened another package of granola bars, broke off a small piece, and called the duckling.

  “Come here, Comet. Come on, little guy. You can do it.”

  He held out his hand, which was filled with crumbs. Comet was smart enough to realize the hunk he had ahold of was not going down his throat. He dropped it and started for Alfred’s outstretched hand.

  “Guys, I think there’s a better way here,” Leo said.

  “No kidding!” Mr. Pilf yelled, looking up at the crushing weight of what was coming. “Like getting off the roof!”

  And that was it for Mr. Pilf. He’d lost what little nerve he had, running to the ladder for good this time.

  “No, I meant there’s a way inside,” Leo said, smiling broadly as Mr. Pilf vanished off the side of the building.

  Leo pointed up, where a square space about the size of two refrigerators was notched out into the bottom of the building. It was a space big enough for three people, a tiny robot, and a duckling to stand in. Comet sat in Alfred’s hand, nibbling pieces of granola, while Remi looked up.

  “I see it!” Remi shouted, grabbing Alfred by the coat. “Come on, this way!”

  The second floor of Merganzer’s hotel was only fifteen feet from landing on the Whippet Hotel roof as Alfred limped along, placing Comet in his pocket. Remi pulled Alfred as fast as he could go, until the building was so low they had to crawl the last few feet. A loud gnashing of hotel parts landing against other hotel parts filled the air around them as the second floor locked into place.

  And then, as if all the lights in the whole world had gone out at once, everything went dark.

  Miss Harrington, are you in there?” Merganzer’s voice echoed through the Whippet Hotel library as if it were being broadcast through a long pipe. To Miss Harrington, who had been searching for clues and trying to avoid the ducks, it sounded like someone yelling into a canyon, a voice echoing off the tall shelves of books.

  “Is that you, Mr. Whippet?” Miss Harrington called back, for truly she did not like being all alone in the empty library. The bookshelves towered all around her, and there had also been that business of all the noise overhead, as though a giant boulder had landed on the roof of the library.

  “It is me!” Merganzer’s voice reverberated though the library. “We’ll need to get the ducks out at once. Also, you’ve been disqualified. I’m afraid you’ve managed to find yourself trapped under another floor. Very unfortunate.”

  “Am I really out of the competition already? How depressing!” Miss Harrington yelled as she made her way toward the sound of Merganzer’s voice. The lights in the library flickered on and off, which got her to thinking the whole place might come crashing down around her. “Wasn’t this the roof of the Whippet Hotel at one time?”

  She had come to a hole in the side of the building that did not look big enough for her to crawl through. There was light on the other side, four feet down a tunnel, and also the black shadow of Merganzer’s head. He had turned sideways, so she could see his silhouette in profile. The shadow of his long, crooked nose was on full display.

  “It was the roof; that’s correct!” Merganzer said, sounding very pleased with himself. “And now it’s been returned to where it belongs, where it was before. It’s a foundation again, as it should be. Don’t you see?”

  Miss Harrington pondered these words for a moment and realized she was almost certainly dealing with a genius and a madman. Betty flew up into the air and waddled down the tunnel toward Merganzer, while the ducklings struggled and failed to climb the wall. Miss Harrington took pity on them, picking them up one at a time and placing them in the round passageway. They waddled and fell over and waddled some more, and eventually all the fowl were clear of the library, standing outside where Merganzer fed them animal crackers.

  “How do I get out?” Miss Harrington asked. She was not fond of ducks, but now that they were gone and she was alone, the bookshelves bothered her even more. And she felt something else, an emotion she knew all too well and tried very hard to avoid: loneliness. She heard a loud noise overhead and felt the ground shake under her feet.

  “Settling in, that’s all,” Merganzer said, although his voice cracked like he wasn’t so sure of himself. “I hadn’t really planned to have someone in here just yet. Maybe you could read a book. I’ll send food.”

  “You don’t mean to leave me in here!” Miss Harrington was becoming just a little bit hysterical. “There must be a door. Or that small elevator — what about that?”

  Merganzer shook his head. “No, that’s not going to work. And there are no doors, not yet.”

  “Well, make one, you imbecile!”

  Miss Harrington had forgotten that Merganzer D. Whippet was her boss and quite possibly the only person who could get her out of the predicament she was in.

  “I’ll send in some tea, pronto!” Merganzer said. And then he was gone, for he hated confrontations, and besides, he wanted to play with the ducks, not talk to a hotel manager.

  “Merganzer!” Miss Harrington yelled. But it was no use.

  Merganzer D. Whippet was no longer there.

  Leo, Remi, and Alfred were sealed inside four walls and a top made of frosted glass, the kind that can’t be seen through. They could make out shapes in the distance, and movements and strange sounds, but they could not see into the vast room beyond the glass, where the second floor of the new Whippet Hotel lay hidden. There were things moving out there, but they couldn’t see what they were. Black letters in all different shapes and sizes were trapped inside the glass. They looked fuzzy, like deep shadows, and they begged to be touched. So of course Remi touched one.

  “I think I broke it,” Remi said, because when he touched a letter A, it burst into gray like a pile of ashes under a tennis shoe. A second later, the letter A appeared inside the glass in a new place.

  “Hmmmmm,” Remi said, rubbing his chin. The situation was taxing his brain in a way that made his head hurt a little bit. He reached out and touched about twenty letters in the space of two seconds, then did his best karate kick to one side and then another, knocking out four more letters in the blink of an eye.

  “He’s faster than he looks,” Alfred said as the letters all returned in different places inside the dusty glass.

  “Oh yeah,” Leo said. “It runs in the family. We’re all like ninjas.”

  “Lightning ninjas,” Remi added, popping his knuckles as he looked around with a perplexed look on his face. The frosted glass walls hadn’t burst into a million pieces at the sheer force of his awesomeness.

  “Look here,” Alfred said, pointing his cane up to the ceiling but not touching a letter I.

  “Hey, it’s a message!” Remi shouted. “Good going, Mr. Whitney. I can karate chop that cane of yours in two if you ever, you know, find yourself crawling around on the ground and need it shortened.”

  “I appreciate that, Remi. Really.”

  Remi nodded and the three of them looked at the message written over their heads. Alfred had the most perfect voice ever — low and smooth like an old black-and-white movie actor’s — and he read the words so everyone could hear them: “I have a little house in which I live all alone. It has no doors or windows, and if I want to go out I must break through a wall.”

  “It’s a very Merganzer kind of riddle,” Remi observed.

  “For sure,” Leo added. “And a very Merganzer kind of trap.”

&n
bsp; “Let’s see what Blop thinks.” Remi pulled the coffee-cup-size robot out of his red jacket pocket.

  “Hey, Blop,” Remi said. “Where would I live if I had a little house and I lived all alone and there were no doors or windows? Oh, and if I want out, I break down a wall.”

  Leo, Remi, and Alfred listened carefully as Blop, the tiny tin robot of many words, began deciphering the riddle.

  “If there are no doors and no windows, then there must not be any glass. That rules out approximately ninety-three percent of all known structures in the category of ‘house.’ My calculations tell me … igloo.”

  “Yeah, but an igloo has a door,” Leo pointed out.

  “Not in the dead of night. Eskimos block the entry. It’s a wall at night.”

  Alfred started punching letters in the frosty glass, first an I, then a G, and so on until he spelled out the word igloo.

  Nothing happened.

  “Got any other ideas?” Remi asked Blop, which was probably a mistake, because Blop always had many ideas on every subject. As he yammered on and on about Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry and their uses of doors and windows, Comet, who had been asleep in Alfred’s jacket pocket, popped his head out and looked around. He made a squeaky duckling sound and shook his head awake.

  “I’ve got it!” Leo said. “And it is a very Merganzer kind of riddle.”

  “Do tell,” Alfred Whitney said, taking Comet out of his pocket and holding him fondly. The two were growing closer by the minute.

  Leo started moving around the glass enclosure, searching for letters. As he did, Remi watched a shadow moving across the glass where no one else was looking.

  Something was out there.

  It was huge, like a monster.

  And it was staring at them.

  “Hey, Leo,” Remi stammered as Leo began touching letters, first an E, then a G.

  “It’s an egg!” Leo yelled, looking up and reading the message once more. “‘I have a little house in which I live all alone. It has no doors or windows, and if I want to go out I must break through a wall.’”

  “I’m not so sure we want out of this thing,” Remi said. He put Blop in his pocket for safekeeping and watched as the shadow came nearer. The shadow was so big it covered the whole back wall of glass and crept over the glass ceiling.

  “There!” Leo said, “Another G, up high!”

  Alfred lifted his cane and poked the G — spelling out egg — just as Remi screamed, “Don’t do it!”

  But of course it was too late. As soon as Alfred touched the G and spelled the answer to the riddle, the glass ceiling evaporated into fog. The walls, too. And through the wall of fog Alfred and Leo saw what Remi had seen — the shadow of a very large, unseen thing. Comet dove into Alfred’s pocket and shivered quietly, as the one man among them pushed the two boys back and held his ground.

  “Whatever it is, I’ll protect you. Don’t worry!”

  It was the first time Remi or Leo had heard him take command, and it did make them feel a little bit better, even if the shadow was way bigger than Alfred was.

  “Back, you beast!” Alfred said, waving his cane to and fro, cutting through the fog until the air cleared and the three of them saw the second floor of the new Whippet Hotel. The first thing they realized was that the beast they’d called out was only four inches tall. There was a bright light behind the little creature, which had made its shadow very big.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Leo asked, walking out from behind Alfred. The two boys carefully moved forward, resting their elbows on the top edge of a squat glass wall.

  “It totally is,” Remi answered, his voice full of wonder. “It’s a T. rex.”

  And it was. A miniature dinosaur was looking up at them, roaring with all its might, which sounded sort of like the electric shaver Captain Rickenbacker used to shave the hair off his knuckles (because, he said, hairy knuckles are for villains, not superheroes). The T. rex would have had a real fight on its hands against a hamster. It was that small.

  “This is a tiny dino zoo,” Remi said, looking around in every direction. “Coolest thing ever!”

  Giant boulders and strange trees poked out along a path, creating all sorts of shadowy corners and secret places. Alfred and the boys spread out, walking past a lot more glass enclosures they could peer down into. They held the kinds of things that barely fit inside a boy’s imagination.

  “Check this out!” Leo yelled, and Remi came running, with Alfred limping behind. They all leaned over a low rail and looked down into a field filled with long-necked Brachiosauruses. Tail to head they were less than a foot long, but they still swayed in a way that made them look like they were moving in slow motion. There were six of them, and they were staring intently into holes in the floor, waiting for something to happen. A burst of green leaves appeared out of the holes and they began eating them contentedly.

  “Hey — look at that!” Remi said. A span of glass and stone rose against a wall with flying creatures swooping back and forth through the air.

  “Tiny Pterodactyls,” Alfred said, for the prehistoric winged beasts weren’t any bigger than hummingbirds. “Amazing.”

  They wandered around the miniature dinosaur zoo, marveling at new creatures around every corner, until they took a hard left around a rock and found two people they were hoping not to see.

  Miss Sheezley and E. J. Bosco were standing in the middle of the path, staring back at them.

  “Hello, boys,” Bosco said, his broad, walrus face staring down at them as if they’d shown up at a private party where children were not allowed. Alfred was the first to notice they were acting as if they might be hiding something. He eyed them warily.

  “It’s all quite amazing, don’t you think?” Alfred said as he took a step closer and Miss Sheezley raised her chin, pointing the end of her nose down at him as she held her ground. Her eyes, as usual, were wide and startling.

  “That’s one word for it, I suppose,” she said. “Another would be outrageous.”

  “I’ll give you that,” Alfred said. “Amazing and outrageous.”

  They swapped stories, though it was anyone’s guess if Sheezley and Bosco were telling the truth or not. Leo and Remi informed them that, as far as they knew, Miss Harrington and Mr. Pilf were either hopelessly behind or out of the competition all together.

  “Fine by me,” Bosco said. “Less opposition, easier victory. It’s simple math.”

  He glared at the boys with his watery eyes and his fat face, as if they, too, would be liked much more when they were not standing between Bosco and a hotel empire.

  “We were on the roof of this floor when it started moving,” he continued. “It’s from Miss Harrington’s hotel, the Rochester. A shame she won’t be able to see it with us.”

  He chuckled happily, gazing around the astounding second floor, clearly pleased that Miss Harrington had ruined her chances. “Craziest thing you ever saw. It rose up under the power of that blimp and landed right on top of the Whippet Library.”

  “Then a trap door opened and there was a ladder,” Sheezley said, pointing to the far end of the room. “Over there.”

  “It’s closed now,” Bosco wrapped up. “We’re trapped in here with a bunch of dinosaurs. Good thing they’re small enough to fit under my boot.”

  Leo thought that sounded terrible, like Bosco would be perfectly fine with stepping on a tiny Brontosaurus. He liked Bosco less every time the man opened his mouth.

  “How about you lads go check on the ladder and the door?” Bosco said. “We’ll keep searching” — he paused, touching the flab beneath his chin, and pointed in another direction — “that way. Yes, over by the T. rexes.”

  Remi started to protest, but Alfred jumped in. “That sounds like a plan. Let’s work together, find a way out. There must be another riddle around here someplace.”

  He looked at Leo cleverly, and Leo took the hint.

  “Come on, Remi — let’s go check out that ladder. I bet there’s a s
wamp on the way.”

  “A swamp? Let’s do this!”

  “Good luck, boys,” Miss Sheezley said with the fakest kindness imaginable. “We’ll let you know if we find something of interest.”

  It felt like walking through a low-flung jungle as they turned to go, with big floppy leaves hanging down from every direction and rocks that were just the right size to jump over. They didn’t go very far before Alfred stopped them and knelt down, which seemed to require some painful effort on his part.

  “Those knees of yours are really shot, huh?” Remi commented.

  “The football field takes as well as it gives, no doubt,” Alfred responded with a smile. “Now listen up, boys. I have a strong suspicion those two are hiding something. Why don’t we split up, keep an eye on them?”

  “I like that idea,” Leo said. “It might require some crawling, though. How about I follow them while you and Remi check out the ladder?”

  “Good plan,” Remi said, looking at Alfred as he rose to his feet with a wince of pain. “Leo is a very stealth guy. He sneaks with the best of them.”

  “Thanks, bro,” Leo said. It was the kind of compliment between two boys that meant something.

  Their plan in place, Remi was off like a rocket, searching for more enclosures he could stare down into on the way to the ladder. He was far more interested in seeing live dinosaurs he could hold in his hand than unlocking the next floor.

  “Check it out!” Leo heard Remi shout as they moved farther apart. “Raptors!”

  Raptors, Leo thought, and wanted to turn back. They were his favorite dinosaurs, but there was important stealth work to be done. He got down on his knees as he came to a corner on the path and began to crawl along the edge.

  “I don’t understand,” he heard Miss Sheezley complain. “Why must there always be riddles? It’s maddening.”

  “Now, now, Miss Sheezley,” E. J. Bosco said quietly. “We must stay calm, cool, and collected.”

  “And work fast,” she added. “Those boys and that meddling Alfred Whitney won’t be gone long.”